A German battalion is composed of four companies of 250 men each. Thus among one thousand men there were more than six hundred casualties in the first three months of the war, and this seemed to be about an average list. These lists take no account of those who “died of wounds,” and “missing” is usually a polite way of saying “dead.” It means that the man was too badly hurt to escape, to be helped by his comrades, or to crawl back, and probably was left “between the lines” to die. This explains what at first appears to be a singularly small percentage of killed.
Berlin, Wednesday, December 9th. This afternoon I made my final arrangements for the trip to London. Whenever a special messenger departs with dispatches from the Embassy a Jäger accompanies him to the train, carries the mail-bags and pouch, and sees him safely settled in his compartment. When he arrives at his final destination another Jäger from the Embassy to which he is going meets him at the station.
CHAPTER IX
CARRYING DISPATCHES FROM BERLIN TO LONDON
Thursday, December 10th. Soon after the train left Berlin this morning I judged that I was being shadowed. When it pulled out of the station there were four people, including myself, in the six-place compartment, the two middle seats being vacant, one on my left as I sat next the window and the other diagonally facing me. Soon after the train was well started two men came in and occupied these seats. This in itself was suspicious, since people do not seek seats while a train is in motion. Both moreover had the air of being detectives. I, by this time, know the type well, for I have been constantly shadowed ever since my arrival in Germany and am perfectly certain that my rooms have several times been searched while I was absent. I simply continued to behave with the greatest possible circumspection, the two detectives meanwhile staring at me constantly with fixed intensity.
It was a bit unpleasant because I did not certainly know the nature of the dispatches I carried, but realized that they were extremely important. They were in a small leather mail pouch, padlocked and sealed, which I had set on the floor between my feet and knees. Everything went quietly for some two hours. I could not look out of the window in towns and yards because I might have seen troop-trains, factories, etc., and that would have been “indiscreet.” The part of Germany from Berlin to Holland is utterly flat and uninteresting, so that there was no pleasure in looking at the countryside between stations. I pretended to doze, or read three German weeklies which I had bought. One of these finally precipitated matters. It was the Fliegende Blätter, a comic paper of about the class of Life or Punch. There was in it a joke in German argot which had been too much for my scant knowledge of the language and the courier who had escorted me from the Embassy had by the merest hazard translated it for me. In my desperate efforts to amuse myself I was looking through this sheet again and encountering this joke thought, “If I don’t write down the English I shall forget it.” Whereupon I took out a pencil and wrote the translation interlinearly.
Soon afterwards one of the detectives got up, went out into the corridor, and came back with three conductors who, in Germany, of course, are military officials. The three civilians who had shared the compartment left us as if they had been rehearsed. One of the detectives then suddenly burst into a perfect berserker rage, getting quite purple in the face, and snatching up the Fliegende Blätter proceeded carefully to turn over the pages again and again, holding each page against the light. It was altogether melodramatically ridiculous. Taking the paper from me in this way, although offensive, was perhaps within his rights since it concerned me only in a personal and not in an official way, and so I sat quite calmly in my seat and, biding my time, made no move of any kind. I paid no attention to the conductors, judging the detective to be the kingpin and the conductors merely dragged in as a matter of routine. None of them could read English and they chose to regard the interlineation (one line of about ten words) as extraordinarily suspicious.